Claire Elder
Email: c.elder.1@research.gla.ac.uk
Research title: An Early Modern Scottish Community of Practice: A socio-cultural analysis of formulaic features in the Stewart and Erskine family correspondence, including the letters of Marie Stewart, Countess of Mar.
Research summary
My research focuses on an early modern Scottish epistolary Community of Practice (CoP), analysing how its members established and maintained social relationships through the shared communicative resource of formulaic language. The materials are drawn from the Papers of the Family of Erskine of Alva, held at the National Library of Scotland and National Records of Scotland. The dataset comprises 183 letters sent or received between 1600 and 1644 within the correspondence network of Marie Stewart, countess of Mar (1576–1644) and her husband, John Erskine, 2nd earl of Mar (c. 1562–1634). By adopting the dual designation Stewart-Erskine letters, the thesis intentionally centres Marie Stewart and brings her into greater scholarly visibility. My thesis will argue that religious and epistolary formulae, and symbols, collectively formed a single integrated, multimodal communicative repertoire. It demonstrates that correspondents strategically adapted formulaic language to manage relationships across sociolinguistic contexts and to construct multiple, overlapping identities linked to religious, familial, political, and social affiliations.
As part of my research output my TEI-XML encoded corpus StErCor2 (183 letters in early modern Scots, English and French) will be available for research and educational purposes in 2026. In 2039 the copyright on the materials will expire and the corpus will be available open-access.
Grants
- AHRC DTP Scholarship, Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities (October 2021–March 2025; maintenance and tuition fees award)
- Historical Thesaurus of English, University of Glasgow (September 2020–September 2021; tuition fees award)
- University of Glasgow, Postgraduate Research Community Building & Public Engagement Funding Grant (College of Arts) awarded to purchase materials for a public engagement event: ‘17th Century Scots Letter-Writing workshop’, hosted by Glasgow Women’s Library (February 2022).
Conferences
'The Fermesse, Fidelity and Faith: A Pragmatic Analysis of the Symbols used by an Early Modern Scottish Epistolary Community of Practice.' Formulaic Language in Historical Linguistics: data, methods, tools, and theory, Helsinki, 2–3 June 2025
‘Fermesses in Women’s Letters in Early Modern Scots’: presentation at Workshop on visual and material aspects of letter-writing in early modern Britain, Samuli Kaislaniemi, University College London, November 2024
'Fidelity and Faith: The Stewart kinfolk’s use of the fermesse symbol in their seventeenth-century correspondence’: presentation at Epistolary Culture in Early Modern Scotland workshop, November 2024.
'Overcoming Exclusion: Early Modern Scottish Voices in Letters of Petition'. University of Glasgow Postgraduate Early Modern Society Conference: 'Exclusion in the Early Modern Period', 1-2 June 2023.
Teaching
Post Doctoral Student Tutor, English Language and Linguistics Department, University of Glasgow. Classes: Level 1A and 1B and Level 2B (Historical strand).
